🚨 The use of AI in law firms may quietly widen the gender pay gap rather than close it. It sounds counterintuitive, the tool the whole profession is racing to adopt deepening inequality, but the reasoning is sound, here is why.
AI is best at automating high-volume, routine legal work: document review, first-draft research, due diligence, standard contracts. In law firms, that kind of work is concentrated at the junior end, and it is disproportionately performed by women, who tend to be over-represented in junior and support roles and under-represented in senior partnership. So when AI absorbs that work, two things can happen: those roles shrink, and the billable hours attached to them, long a route to visibility and advancement, fall away. If the rungs of the ladder that women disproportionately occupy are the first to be automated, the pay gap between them and the senior ranks can widen, not narrow. AI is projected to free hundreds of hours per lawyer per year, so this is not a marginal effect.
Has any court ruled on an AI-caused pay gap directly? Not yet. This is an emerging concern, not yet the subject of a decided case anywhere, and it would be inaccurate to suggest otherwise. But that does not mean the law is silent. A pay disparity produced by how AI is deployed would fall to be tested under existing equal-pay and anti-discrimination law, which does not require proof of intent to discriminate. It reaches practices that are neutral on their face but disproportionately disadvantage one group, indirect or structural discrimination.
Article 27 of our Constitution guarantees equality and freedom from discrimination, and Article 41 guarantees fair labour practices, while the Employment Act prohibits discrimination in employment and enshrines equal pay for work of equal value. Kenyan law already recognises that discrimination can be indirect, a policy or practice that looks neutral but lands unequally. So a Kenyan firm whose AI-driven restructuring quietly widened its gender pay gap could, in principle, face scrutiny under that same framework, even absent any discriminatory intent.
The lesson for law firms, here and globally, is to adopt AI with eyes open to its equality effects. Efficiency gains are real and worth pursuing, but firms should monitor how automation reshapes roles, hours and advancement across gender lines, and ensure that the value of work is not measured only in the hours AI is eliminating. Reward the judgment, supervision and client work that remain, in a way that does not disadvantage those whose former tasks the machine now does. AI should widen opportunity, not quietly narrow it.
👉 Follow @Lexken_EMSLaw for practical legal insights on employment law, technology and the profession.
🚨 Your angry WhatsApp text could cost you Sh1.5 million. A man fired off a furious message to an advocate who had just served him with court papers, calling him fraudulent, corrupt and unfit to practice. It reached exactly one other person. It still cost him Sh1.5 million.
The case is Moindi & Company Advocates v Sankeet, a striking lesson in how defamation actually works. After being served with pleadings in a land dispute, the defendant responded by WhatsApp, branding the advocate corrupt, criminal, incompetent and unqualified. The twist that made it actionable: the message was not sent to the advocate's personal phone, but to the firm's office line, where an employee read it. That single fact satisfied the publication requirement, that a defamatory statement be communicated to a third party, and turned a private outburst into a legal wrong.
The court awarded Sh1.5 million because the defendant never apologised or retracted.
WhatsApp messages can amount to defamation. A private message can be actionable if a defamatory statement reaches someone other than its subject.A tiny audience still matters.
The blog also examines a deeper question: whether Kenyan defamation awards in professional-reputation cases are becoming less sensitive to how far a statement actually travelled, when a message read by one person attracts damages approaching those in mass-media cases. It flags an important point on remedies: the court refused a broad injunction against any defamatory statement, holding that such orders must be precise and must not chill lawful criticism.
We unpack the full judgment, the reasoning, the quantum, and the tension it exposes, in a detailed analysis.
Read the full blog on our website, and follow @Lexken_EMSLaw for practical legal insights on defamation, digital communication and professional reputation.
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1. Justices Musinga, Joel Ngugi and Odunga of the Court of Appeal delivered the most consequential judgment for the year 2025. It's a gem in more than one way. The diction, the jurisprudence, the clarity of thought and the sound policy principles it enunciate are breathtakingly refreshing.
2. This judgment settles the law. This judgment creates clarity. This judgment resolved many disputes, many in court for ages. It is a judgment in REM...and applies to all cases pending in court. This is a judgment that addresses the corruption in our country, the county government of Nairobi and even in our neighbourhoods.
3. It highlighted and resolved the governance deficit in City Hall. Boldly, the court inaugurated a process it will supervise within a limited time span to resolve the endless conundrum that defines zoning and building plans in Nairobi. It states clearly that it isn't the job of a judge to decide how tall a building goes.
4. Most importantly, it brought to an end, a thriving cottage industry of corrupt lawyers, JurisPESA judges, crooked city hall mandarins and FAKE neighbourhood organisations who were making crazy money extorting and blackmailing property developers.
5. The court should be commended for the foresight and vision it exhibited. It went beyond the specific dispute before the court and resolved issues that bedevilled the sector, like thieving lawyers and JurisPESA judges and sent them home for good.
6. In matters of zoning and building plans for Nairobi, we now have peace and order, thanks to Justices Musinga, Joel Ngugi and Odunga.
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